Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

ourworldindata.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 350 posts

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#91

Post by dahart »

elliekelly wrote: post #71
claudiawerner wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that follow from the fact that there are way more people concerned with the state of education (because everyone must be educated) than there are people who have ideas for far fetched science research and companies? Education is viewed (rightly in my opinion) as an intrinsic good. Somebody's far fetched idea for a company isn't.

A handful of far-fetched ideas have added more economic value to the world than every diploma combined. I’m not sure we could even assign a dollar value to crazy ideas like satellites or the internet because the positive externalities they’ve created are so far-reaching. Crazy ideas a lot harder to evaluate, and a lot riskier, but they’re definitely not less valuable.

The crazy ideas you cite as examples came from people with diplomas.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#92

Post by toasterlovin »

eaenki wrote: post #25
easytiger wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unbelievably childish idea which would be trivial to gamify. You only have to look at the industrialised corruption of public tenders for legitimate needs in Africa for a glimpse of human nature.

While this is just a very basic idea I put out, still, corruption is rampant everywhere anyway. I suspect it would be a net positive to have a ton of Brilliant students getting money for their projects even if half of the money are corrupted away.

Corruption is not rampant everywhere. And perhaps that gets at the root of why some places have functioning modern economies and others do not.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#93

Post by abakker »

bumby wrote: post #62
jjoonathan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fan of the chemistry analogy here: you can catalyze (reduce barriers) and you can incentivize (increase rewards). If the incentives point the wrong way, catalyzing won't help. If the barriers are too high, incentivizing won't help. I strongly suspect we're in a "barriers too high" regime rather than an "incentives are too low" regime, and that our money would be better spent reducing barriers than increasing in…

I think I agree but the question seems to be how do we lower the barriers smartly while still keeping the intent of the rules and regulations? Add to it our own bias to put more emphasis on the regulations that concretely prevent us from doing what we want now, rather than those that abstractly benefit us and its easy to point to them being the problem. It's like the "one mans trash is another mans treasure" cliche,…

The real question is: why did we install the protections(barriers) in the first place? I assume that a major component of that was as a reaction to the increasing complexity of modern life. Self sufficiency is fine, but it is difficult to take the consequences for many things knowingly. As such, we created, one at a time, experientially driven barriers designed to protect people from new, novel issues.

I don’t think we need to offer more incentives or reduce barriers per se, but I think we really ought to be talking about refactoring our laws. The amount of legislative “technical debt” is intense and problematic.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#94

Post by ta1234567890 »

jjoonathan wrote: post #32
eaenki wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is just a very basic idea I put out, still, corruption is rampant everywhere anyway. I suspect it would be a net positive to have a ton of Brilliant students getting money for their projects even if half of the money are corrupted away.

You can't satisfy corruption by throwing money at it and hoping it only takes its share. It won't. It will take it all, and then it will find a way to take more besides.

So what is the solution to corruption?

It does seem like it's getting worse, or maybe media coverage about it is getting better.

Has any country in the world successfully fought corruption in a peaceful way? (ie. no revolutions, no guillotines)

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#95

Post by toasterlovin »

inimino wrote: post #43
easytiger wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unbelievably childish idea which would be trivial to gamify. You only have to look at the industrialised corruption of public tenders for legitimate needs in Africa for a glimpse of human nature.

> Unbelievably childish idea Easy, tiger. Maybe you can show off your big-boy wisdom by suggesting a better idea rather than just shooting this one down.

The big boy wisdom is that most social problems are probably not solvable. And that’s why they remain problems.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#96

Post by blurbleblurble »

toyg wrote: post #18
eaenki wrote: post #9

Imo Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated, And, Because Capital is trapped into networks, that Capital is squandered among an infinite array of companies employing the talent and producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier. (Apple’s SJ era, Google until 2014~ and Tesla fit the useful smarter happier paradigma, and not many other) My solution is: take a…

Capital is not underappreciated - it is hidden by owners. Because their power and wealth comes from control of a scarce, hidden resource. If everyone had access to capital, nobody would be “on top”, and that’s unacceptable to the owning classes.

But if you ask them about it they'll tell you they're practically giving it away!

Terms and conditions may apply though...

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#97

Post by delfinom »

PostOnce wrote: post #15
petra wrote: post #2

How many talented people , in advanced economies, with good technical degrees , do take part in inventing important stuff ? Very few. Educating more kids and having more "ideas" won't change that. We're not lacking ideas. We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen.

Everything is a hassle. Building permits, operating licenses, legal compliance, etc. All those things arguably exist for good reasons, but it's a huge hurdle to doing anything useful. I can't have a 20 foot radio tower in town, I can't subdivide smaller than 10 acres outside of town, I can't build any facility out there to operate the experimental tower without building permits, radio licenses, compliance with tracki…

>All those things arguably exist for good reasons, but it's a huge hurdle to doing anything useful.

Humans are good at coming up at ideas, the problem is, not all ideas are good ideas. But humans are especially good at ideas to maximize their profit resulting in permits and compliance are written in resulting blood along with the engineering standards enforced.

Unfortunately the threat of jail does not deter those ideas, but putting enough barriers that everyone working under them have to jump through does a really good job at reducing the amount that follow through with them.

The other aspect, it doesn't take much to kill a human. The rules may seem overkill, but a human is a soft squishy fleshbag where tripping on a pencil could kill you.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#98

Post by paulcole »

eaenki wrote: post #9

Imo Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated, And, Because Capital is trapped into networks, that Capital is squandered among an infinite array of companies employing the talent and producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier. (Apple’s SJ era, Google until 2014~ and Tesla fit the useful smarter happier paradigma, and not many other) My solution is: take a…

> My solution is: take a piece of the federal budget and give $1-3MM to anyone with a far fetched idea that has a prototype to back it up

So giving millions to people who are already privileged enough to have access to the tools/resources/education to make to a prototype?

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#99

Post by kortilla »

zzzcpan wrote: post #36
easytiger wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it another millenial fantasy much like basic income et al I suspect giving people with no life experience, exposure to failure or real life dynamics will end badly. The single digit number of success stories in limited domains aren't representative of any real meaning

Giving people money at minimum redistributes wealth, so it cannot possibly be any worse, than letting wealth concentrate.

>Giving people money at minimum redistributes wealth, so it cannot possibly be any worse

Of course it will. Basic income is so expensive that the wealth don’t have enough to take to fund it. It’s going to require massive taxes in the middle class that result in a quality of life loss.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#100

Post by paulcole »

petra wrote: post #2

How many talented people , in advanced economies, with good technical degrees , do take part in inventing important stuff ? Very few. Educating more kids and having more "ideas" won't change that. We're not lacking ideas. We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen.

I mean virtually nobody does anything that's important, whether they're talented or not or have a good degree or not. We're pretty good at fooling ourselves into thinking what we're doing is important though.
Post reply on HN